SourceCon 2013 - Day 1

The only thing cooler than having a conference in your home city is to have it hosted by your employer. I was lucky enough to snag a seat to the hottest sourcing conference around and the first time ever in Seattle. My day started out like any other, except instead of heading to my office I got to join 400+ recruiters and sourcers from across the country at The Mixer. Need a haircut? New eye glasses? Want to check out the latest bicycles? We have all that and more at the Commons, plus a ton of great food court style restaurants. But I digress…

The best part of this event so far has been reconnecting with people I met at Talent42 and TruSeattle plus finally getting face to face with people I only know from social media. Jeremy Roberts kicked off the event with a great presentation (blog post coming on that) and then we broke into three separate tracks – Leadership, Tactical, and Sourcing Lab.

I stuck with the tactical track as it seemed to be geared towards the more junior sourcers. I’ve been in recruiting for over a decade and am no Boolean slouch, but I’ve typically been full cycle and not solely focused on candidate generation. I have to admit I finished the day wishing I’d gone for more technical tracks. The content was ok, but the Boolean track was definitely very junior. I guess I’m a better sourcer than I thought.

Glen Gutmacher gave an outstanding presentation on web-scraping, and I did learn a lot from that one. The after party started with drinks and I finally got to hang out with Phil Hendrickson from Starbucks (also a panelist) who I’ve been chasing on Twitter (@IslandDad) for years. I also got to learn more about JobFig from the always charming Ravi Mikkelsen and met the lovely Kelsey Sampson from Avature. If you’re in the market for a CRM you must talk to her.

Overall a great start to a fantastic networking event – I’ll definitely take a harder look at the presentations and hopefully pick better sessions for me, though it is nice to see content available across all levels. Then there's the downside to having a conference in your home town - I still have to go HOME. Kids still want to be fed, dog still needs to be walked.... Maybe the next time I blog a conference it can be from somewhere sunny and far away like Vegas.

Comment by Will Thomson on October 3, 2013 at 9:41am: Wish I was there!

Comment by Keith D. Halperin on October 3, 2013 at 11:00am: Thanks, Amy. As someone who is frequently hired as a sourcer (either just as a sourcer or as part of A-Z recruiting), I know it is vital to find people, through whatever means. I also think there will be an ongoing need for highly-skilled individuals who can ferret out the really-hard-to-find that others can’t get. However, I think you’ll not need to use these folks very often, as Career X-Roads said: only 6.8% of hires were directly sourced by the responders. Let’s say *half of these could be through-sourced (automated) or out-sourced (sent away), so only 3.4% or 1/29 hires need to be deep-sourced. As a FT recruiter, I often have 20-25 reqs. I haven’t been hired as an exclusively deep-sourcer, so my following numbers may be off, but let’s say a deep sourcer can handle 8 positions effectively (1/hr) at once. To keep a deep-sourcer (who I think should be paid at least $50/hr for their services) fully busy, a company would need to have: 8 reqs/sourcer x 29 reqs (the 1 out of 29 reqs suitable for the deep sourcer to work on) or 232 open reqs. I think there are a relatively small number (under 1,000, perhaps?) of companies with this many difficult reqs on an ongoing basis. BOTTOM LINE:: there isn’t a need for many FT inhouse deep-sourcers, and the need is likely to decrease over time, as described above.

Finally, I wonder if it would be relatively easily to train experienced skip-tracers (whose job is to find people who don’t want to be found) in the additional skills needed for deep-sourcing? These folks don’t make much money….

Skip Tracer Salary Statistics as of 2013 (http://jobstat.net/jobs/skip-tracer/) Average annual salary for a Skip Tracer is $27937 based on statistics in the U.S. as of 2013. The highest salary recorded was $55752. The lowest salary reported was $20358. These figures will vary on a state to state basis as these are averages across all 50 states.

Furthermore, MS, Google. and a few other firms have the computing power to access everyone in the world of interest and keep tabs on their activities/updates- all publically accessible and legal data. In a few years, lots of companies and powerful individuals will have access to data tools which today would make the NSA jump for joy. My question here: if you know where everyone you want is and what they're doing, WHY DO YOU NEED TO SOURCE THEM? (If you know where your car keys are and how to get to them, you don't have to look for them and track them down). Increasingly finding the people isn't the problem, it's getting something worthwhile to say to them and getting them to talk to you that is the problem.

Cheers,

Keith

*I think it’s a higher percentage, but let’s stick with this for now…

Comment by Noel Cocca on October 3, 2013 at 12:20pm: The event was better for having you there I am sure!

Comment by Amber on October 3, 2013 at 12:37pm: Thanks for posting, Amy! Pretty sure I would need to be in Tactical sessions, though - I am definitely way low skill level I think. Boolean takes me a long time to get what I'm trying for! Although, I accidentally have found lots of great stuff I wasn't intending to...

Comment by Malia Jorgensen on October 3, 2013 at 12:53pm: Sounds like a great conference! Wish I signed up.

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on October 3, 2013 at 2:18pm: Thanks everyone! Great conference, Day 2 is even better. Much much more to come! Amber hit me up when you need a Boolean string :)